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Yesterday on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme, Prime
Minister David Cameron made impassioned claims about “fighting” for "hardworking
taxpayers": “They want the country changed. I want to change the country for
them,” he insisted. But changes afoot at the Ministry of Defence are being made
without taxpayers' knowledge and against their interests,
according to Plaid Cymru MP Elfyn
Llwyd.

Mr Llwyd, who last year revealed that a £44 pair of army boots
had been shipped from Bicester in Oxfordshire to Northern Ireland at a cost of more
than £700, secured a Parliamentary debate last week about “excessive spending, excessive pricing and
excessive commissioning” at Bicester, the MoD logistics
base which sends military supplies around Britain and all over the world.

“The
scale of management error is so large and so endemic that, to my eyes, it
almost looks systematic,” claimed Mr Llwyd. “In a nutshell, we believe that
the logistics operation is having its costs inflated in order to hive it off
into the private sector. I also believe that MoD logistics is being fattened
for that purpose.”

He
went further: “I believe that the officials responsible for this are perhaps positioning
themselves to make a fortune out of it in due course.”

Back
in 2007 the Labour government closed the MoD’s network of regional distribution
centres, shrank the truck fleet, cut driver numbers, and outsourced delivery to
private hauliers and couriers. Mr Llwyd disputes the Coalition government’s
claim that annual net savings of £4m were achieved as a result. (Channel 4’s
Cathy Newman subjects the £4m claim to scrutiny here).

Mr
Llwyd asked the government: “Did the restructuring work? Have the new
arrangements saved money? Were the highly paid consultants who devised the new
system worth their fee?" He went on:

“The fact is we do not know whether the business
operation has been analysed to show whether it works better or not. The figures
have been arranged to show a financial benefit from the new structure.
Real-time reports from the computer system, as well as common sense, present a
very different picture.”

He
said: “I
asked the pertinent questions about how many miles were driven, the number of
trips that were made, the hours that were taken, the class of vehicle driven
and the cost per mile. I was told that the information was not held centrally and
was not available, except at disproportionate cost. That is not true. . . All
the information is there within half a dozen keystrokes. . .Otherwise how could
the Department know what it was actually spending and what it was doing?”

He
called for an urgent investigation and a report to the minister.

The government's reply — from procurement minister Peter Luff — was strong in self-assurance and information-lite. Mr Luff accused the member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd of seeing “a conspiracy where there is
none”. He said: "The suggestion of fattening up for some kind of killing is just wrong.”

The
minister detected in Mr Llwyd “an underlying hostility to the
role that the private sector can play in delivering defence outputs more
effectively”.

Mistakes
happen, said Mr Luff. “Against a background of 8,000 daily deliveries, it is
unfair to assert some kind of systematic error, inefficiency or corruption.” There
is a fraud hotline and “whistleblowing is entirely encouraged in the Ministry
of Defence”.

Indeed,
he said:

“I am aware
of no such allegation of impropriety in the logistics organisation being made
on the hotline.”

Had
he asked? one MP inquired.

“I
did not ask,” replied the minister. “I
am sure that they would have been drawn to my attention had they been made.”

Then
the minister’s rhetoric took a Swiftian lurch:

“I am frankly suspicious about
whether the allegations have any foundation. However, I will double check.
Question after question has been answered, and nothing that it would be
improper to conceal will be concealed.”

He went on:

“Some information sometimes
must be kept private for reasons of commercial confidentiality. That is
frustrating for politicians and democrats, but sometimes it is important.
However, we shall be as open as we possibly can.”

Such
answers — circular, uninformative, insincere — are likely to be rolled out with increasing frequency by the government
as information about vital public services — defence, health, policing,
education — disappears into the vault of commercial confidentiality as a
consequence of breakneck privatisation.

Mr Llwyd said the debate asked: “Does Parliament have any power to
hold the Government to account? Does the Government have the necessary control
over their civil service in this area, or are we all to be treated as nothing
more than a nuisance by officials who spend £27 million a year of the public’s
money?”

When
Elfyn Llwyd mentioned the £700 delivery charge on a pair of army boots at
Prime Minister’s Questions last year, David Cameron replied:

“I recognise the point you
make and one of the things we are trying to do in the Ministry of Defence is
recognise that there’s a huge amount of cost in terms of back office and
logistics and we want to make that more efficient so we can actually spend
money on the front line.”

Note the familiar key words: back office costs, efficiencies, spending
money on the front line — lifted straight
from the Privatisers Cut-n-Paste. While Mr Cameron pursues his mission of
“changing the country”, Mr Llwyd is still waiting for information that might reveal whether
Bicester’s outsourcing to contractors serves the public interest or betrays it.